Iraq Reporters Hit Back at Claims They Are Biased on War

By: E&P Staff After the latest round of blaming the media for distorted coverage in Iraq, which emerged this week from top Bush administraton officials, war reporters and editors strongly defended their coverage this weekend in a variety of venues, as violence in the country reached new levels.

Washington Post reporter Steve Fainaru, who recently completed a 14-month stint in Iraq, commented: "Everyone wants to read their view of the war in your story. To me the only issue is whether our stories are real or not. I never got complaints from the people who were involved in the subject matter of the stories.

"The job of soldiering over there is incredibly difficult. I have tremendous respect for those guys. The criticism completely misses the point. Iraq is on the verge of civil war. Where's the good news?"

Writing in The New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman traced the recent upsurge in sadistic killings, then commented: "If this all sounds depressing, it is. That's how people here feel. I've been looking hard, but in two weeks I haven't found an Iraqi optimist.

"In the summer of 2004, I profiled a band of young artists who braved dangerous roads to get away from Baghdad and paint pretty pictures of the Tigris River. Now, they're homebound. There is a similar sense of newfound hopelessness in the faces of the Iraqis I work with....It is difficult to communicate just how violent Baghdad has become."

Clark Hoyt, Washington editor for Knight Ridder, in a commentary piece, wrote, ?Our reporting tells us that it's true that there are areas of Iraq -- in the Shiite south and the Kurdish north -- where people walk the streets in relative peace. But Baghdad, Iraq's capital and most populous city, and the Sunni Triangle to its northwest are hellishly dangerous. And that lack of security has overshadowed everything else as Iraqis struggle to build a democratic future.?

Appearing on NBC, its Baghdad correspondent Richard Engel said, ?Most Iraqis I speak to say, ?Actually most reporters get it wrong--it?s the situation on the ground is actually worse than the images we project on television.?"

He added: ?We?ll see more and more reports coming out by the media explaining how they are covering the war and I think the Bush administration overplayed their hand in trying to blame their problems on the media.?

Numerous other stories or opinion pieces appeared tackling the question: Is the media missing the ?good news? from Iraq?

A lengthy column on the subject today by Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell (where the Fainaru quote appeared) closes with a quote from the paper's military correspondent Thomas Ricks: "Blaming the media is like blaming the rain."

Actually, horrific events in Iraq pretty much provided all the defense the journalists needed. Dozens of Iraqs were killed in violence on Sunday, including a 13-year-old boy killed by a bomb as he walked to school in the southern city of Basra. Police also found 11 handcuffed and bullet-riddled bodies dumped in Baghdad and two in the city of Baqouba. The Iraqi army said it also had dispatched troops to investigate a report of 30 beheaded corpses in a village north of Baghdad.

This and more led Gettleman in The New York Times late Sunday to make this startling observation: "American officials are now saying that Shiite militias are the No. 1 security problem in Iraq, more dangerous than the Sunni-led insurgents." And he added: "Security in Baghdad seems to be deteriorating by the hour, and it is increasingly unclear who is in control."

The most detailed exchange on the good news/bad news debate took place on Howard Kurtz?s ?Reliable Sources? on CNN Sunday morning. Here is a lengthy quote from the transcript, featuring CBS correspondent Lara Logan and Pamela Hess of UPI.
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KURTZ: Bush and Cheney essentially seem to be accusing you and your colleagues of carrying the terrorist message by reporting on so many of these attacks. What do you make of that?

LOGAN: Well, I think that's -- that is a very convenient way of looking at it. It doesn't reflect the value judgment that's implicit in that.

As a journalist, if an American soldier or an Iraqi person dies that day, you have to make a decision about how you weigh the value of reporting that news over the value of something that may be happening, say, a water plant that's being turned on that brings fresh water to 200 Iraqi people. I mean, you get accused of valuing human life in a certain way depending on how you report it.

And also, as -- I mean, what I would point out is that you can't travel around this country anymore without military protection. You can't travel without armed guards. You're not free to go every time there's a school opening or there's some reconstruction project that's being done.

We don't have the ability to go out and cover those. If they want to see a fair picture of what's happening in Iraq, then you have to first start with the security issue.

When journalists are free to move around this country, then they will be free to report on everything that's going on. But as long as you're a prisoner of the terrible security situation here, then that's going to be reflected in your coverage.

And not only that, but their own figures show that their reconstruction project was supposed to create 1.5 million Iraqi jobs. To date, 77,000 Iraqi government jobs have been created. That should give you an indication of how far along they are in terms of reconstruction.

We have to put everything in its context. We can't go to one small unit and say, oh, they did a great job in this village and ignore all the other villages that haven't seen any improvement in their conditions.

KURTZ: There is no question that the dangerous conditions for journalists there are making it much harder to report on some of these signs of progress, as you point out. But I look at just the last couple of weeks of your coverage. Besides covering the Saddam trial, you reported on allegations that U.S. troops had killed a group of civilians. Then you reported an attack on a police station, the bombing of a police convoy, you talked about the threat of a civil war. All legitimate stories. But critics would say, well, no wonder people back home think things are falling apart because we get this steady drumbeat of negativity from the correspondents there.

LOGAN: Well, who says things aren't falling apart in Iraq? I mean, what you didn't see on your screens this week was all the unidentified bodies that have been turning up, all the allegations here of militias that are really controlling the security forces.

What about all the American soldiers that died this week that you didn't see on our screens? I mean, we've reported on reconstruction stories over and over again, but the order to (ph) general for Iraqi reconstruction says that only 49 of well over 100 planned electricity projects happened.

So we can't keep doing the same stories over and over again. When a police station's attacked, that's something new that happened this week. If you had any idea of the number of Iraqis that come to us with stories of abuses of U.S. soldiers and you look at our coverage over the last -- my coverage over the last few weeks, or even over the last three years, there's been maybe two or three stories that have related to that.

So, I mean, we have to do the stories that when we've tested them and tested them and checked all our sources, and that they are legitimate stories on that day, that that is the biggest news coming out of Iraq, then that's what we have to do.

KURTZ: So what you're saying...

LOGAN: I mean, I really resent the fact that people say that we're not reflecting the true picture here. That's totally unfair and it's really unfounded.

KURTZ: So what you're saying is that what we see on the "CBS Evening News" or other networks actually is only a snapshot, is only perhaps scratching the surface of the kinds of violence and difficulties that you are witnessing day after day because you can only get so much of this on the air?

LOGAN: Oh, yes. Absolutely. And, I mean, our own -- you know, our own editors back in New York are asking us the same things.

They read the same comments. You know, are there positive stories? Can't you find them?

You don't think that I haven't been to the U.S. military and the State Department and the embassy and asked them over and over again, let's see the good stories, show us some of the good things that are going on? Oh, sorry, we can't take to you that school project, because if you put that on TV, they're going to be attacked about, the teachers are going to be killed, the children might be victims of attack.

Oh, sorry, we can't show this reconstruction project because then that's going to expose it to sabotage. And the last time we had journalists down here, the plant was attacked.

I mean, security dominates every single thing that happens in this country. Reconstruction funds have been diverted to cover away from reconstruction to -- they've been diverted to security.

Soldiers, their lives are occupied most of the time with security issues. Iraqi civilians' lives are taken up most of the time with security issues.

So how it is that security issues should not then dominate the media coverage coming out of here?

KURTZ: What do you make of (Laura Ingraham's) comment about reporting from hotel balconies?

LOGAN: Well, I think it's outrageous....I mean, I don't know any journalist that wants to just sit in a hotel room in Iraq. Does anybody understand that for us we used to be able to drive to Ramadi, we used to drive to Falluja, we used to drive to Najaf. We could travel all over this country without having to fly in military helicopters.

That's the only way we can move around here. So, it's when the military can accommodate us, if the military can accommodate us, then we can go out and see.

I have been out with Iraqi security forces over and over again. And you know what? When Bob Woodruff was out with Iraqi security forces and he was injured, the first thing that people were asking was, oh, was he being responsible by placing himself in this position with Iraqi forces? And they started to question his responsibility and integrity as a journalist.

I mean, we just can't win. I think it's an outrage to point the finger at journalists and say that this is our fault. I really do. And I think it shows an abject lack of respect for any journalist that's prepared to come to this country and risk their lives.

KURTZ: All right. I do...

LOGAN: And that's not just me. That's the crews, that's all the people that make up our teams here.

KURTZ: I want to bring into our discussion Pam Hess, Pentagon correspondent for UPI.

Pam Hess, you spent nine weeks in Iraq. What do you make of this notion that some people apparently have that reporters are reporting from the balconies when basically some of them are just trying to avoid getting blown up?

PAMELA HESS, UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL: And I've actually spent five months in Iraq over the last three years.

Television reports from balconies because that's where the infrastructure was. But I was up in Tal Afar with Laura Logan. I can promise you that she's out in the country. And everything that Lara Logan said is true.

But there's an important part here. And it's -- and it sort of plays in with what the president said, which is, news media is biased towards drama. And in an insurgent campaign, drama is always on the side of the insurgents. So there is something that we need to do as reporters, which is to recognize how media is used by both sides, by the U.S. and by the insurgents, and try to balance our coverage that way.

And the way that you do that is by developing sources within the military who are out in other places where you can find out about things that are going on that you can't get to.

KURTZ: Pam Hess, are there times when you want to report on something the military has done, perhaps something more positively, and you don't get much help from the Pentagon?

HESS: Just this week, as a matter of fact, we asked Donald Rumsfeld and Admiral Giambastiani about the successful hostage rescue in Baghdad which released the British hostages that had been there. One of their -- a number -- an American had been killed. And they punted on it. They said read the transcript from Baghdad. They didn't tell us about it.

So when we want to report something positive, a rescue, they didn't give us the information.